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Fantastic Fest 2024 – The Best

Posted on October 6, 2024 | Leave a comment

Another year, another Fantastic Fest! I saw 34 films over a one week period and my brain feels like it’s boiling. Some great stuff this year and some films that were very thought-provoking. I don’t follow the “film circuit” other than this so I go in blind on all the movies. “It won at Cannes!” “Oh, really?” FF is my favorite vacation of the year – no planning stuff to placate family members, no travel rigors – just pick 5 movies a day and grind through them and fill your brain with diverse images and ideas.

General thoughts from the fest:

  • I think “child endangerment” is the real theme of this year’s Fantastic Fest, even though it’s allegedly clowns…  Well, maybe they are the same thing? But kids are NOT safe in any of these movies.
  • “We got access to a nice house; let’s film an entire movie in it” (apparently not purely for pandemic reasons) is a pretty common thing this year
  • The surprise “secret screenings” were kinda bougie this year, possibly due to Sony buying the Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest. They are fine movies but Saturday Night and The Apprentice are not aligned with the usual FF content.
  • The weird “violence is more tolerated, sex is less tolerated” Hollywood vibe continues; some pretty gruesome bits in otherwise more sedate fare was confusing – at least two movies could have been PG barring a couple random gore incidents that seemed out of character for the film. I guess everything goes to screening so MPAA ratings are irrelevant? Or is the MPAA so far gone that brutal violence is fine now but breasts cause you to burst into flames? Dunno.

I’ve rated the films I saw 1-10 based on my subjective opinion.

  • 9-10: Must watch for anyone, seek it out!
  • 7-8: Good stuff
  • 5-6: Mid but watchable if you like the genre
  • 3-4: Maybe if you’re really into its thing
  • 1-2: So angry that I saw this

I’ll start out with the best ones, and do separate posts for the good, mid, and fair to bad ones. There were five films I really loved this year. And interestingly, they each in a completely different genre from the rest, so there should be something for everyone!

Planet B (10/10) is an excellent French political sci-fi thriller about a near future filled with drone surveillance and citizen suppression (a very near future, in other words) where captured dissidents get disappeared and put in total VR immersion to try to get more info out of them. Super realistic and plausible. The two female leads, one who is a captured dissident and one who is an immigrant ex-journalist cleaning lady who happens upon the plot, do a super job. The theme of trust was razor edged – you can’t trust anyone in a secret police state (especially inside VR) where the main thing is them trying to get names of others out of you – but you have to trust others to survive and fight back. This is director Aude Lea Rapin’s second feature (and the first was filmed guerilla), she was a documentarian previously. It’s set in 2039 but this may be a reality sooner; I guarantee there’s some twisted f**k at the Pentagon working on this concept right now.  “Now hear me out… Mind Guantanamo!” Very clever veneer of democracy on top of it – well we can’t torture them in VR, that would look bad if we got discovered, but how about sleep deprivation via nightmares of their crimes? We can’t monitor them but we can play mind games to get them to narc on each other…  The tension was high throughout and you were never sure if a given gambit would work or backfire terribly. The tech was pretty much modern day plus a little, it goes past plausible to inevitable. I strongly recommend this movie, it is what science fiction is meant to do. “The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future, but to prevent it.” – Ray Bradbury

Daniela Forever (10/10) is Fest favorite Nacho Vigalondo’s (Colossal, Timecrimes) newest feature. And he’s back baby!!! Amazingly fun and thoughtful, a musician Nicolas in Madrid (Henry Golding, aka Snake Eyes) is mourning the sudden loss of his girlfriend Daniela (Beatrice Granno) and not doing well until a friend gets him into a clinical trial for a lucid dreaming drug to try to get over it. Instead he now lives to dream about her. Surprises abound as his grief and selfishness interact.  Do we think of other people in our lives as just NPCs and our volition as the thing of paramount importance? If we think they’re not real, does that change how we should – or would – act? We start out as kind of a reverse Eternal Sunset of the Spotless Mind (remember the ex, not forget her) and get nearly to I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream with him playing God and getting unhinged before we end up with a converse Eternal Sunshine.  The emotional journey is deep and complex and thought-provoking. The waking world is filmed in old magnetic tape and the dream world in full 4k creating an unmistakable context to let you know where you are (until deliberately played with, of course). And it wouldn’t be a Nacho movie without some truly hilarious bits (their “monster costumes” of Dracula With A Chainsaw and Shark With A Gun had the audience hooting in glee). A new best for Nacho and a movie definitely as meaningful and memorable as Eternal Sunshine.

Sister Midnight (10/10) is a great slow burn comedy/drama in Hindi by first time director Karan Kandhari following a newly married Indian couple leading an estranged life in a 10×10 shack-end in Mumbai. Radhika Apte, the lead actress, gives a superb performance – even when she is just sitting isolated in her hovel all day while her husband is at work she is captivating and conveys entire soliloquies of meaning with every gesture or look. She is lonely and frustrated and it’s at least partially her fault because she’s a bit antisocial and difficult. She slowly learns how to do domestic basics and makes friends with a neighbor and the local trans women (hijras) who give street blessings and a guy who runs the elevator at her work, and then things take a dark turn as she starts to feel sick and have trouble tolerating – *normal* food…  I don’t want to give away anything about what happens because it was so rewarding to not know what was coming, but this movie is brilliant and one of my favorites of the fest. Trust and watch. Did well at Cannes and for a first movie from this guy…  Dang!  Also has a top flight soundtrack, Delta blues (we open on a train chugging down moonlit tracks to it) to Iggy Pop (the movie’s named after one of his songs).

Ghost Killer (9/10) is a fun Japanese action movie about a girl who finds a shell casing from a bullet used to murder a hit man, so his ghost haunts her and can possess her and share his martial arts badassery with her so she can bring the pain as she goes up against his foes and hers.  As you might expect it’s female empowerment / youth empowerment but not as goofy as that often is and has super solid serious action scenes. She refuses to kill but not in the usual naive self-righteous way.  The characters all have reasonable motivations that are not just “squealing” or “murder” unlike, frankly, a lot of other Japanese films in this vein. This is a formula we’ve seen before but here it’s executed way more skillfully. The director, Kensuke Sonomura, is the fight choreographer on the Baby Assassins series and this is his directing debut, and it beats those hands down for my money!

Get Away (9/10) – Midsommar meets Hot Fuzz written by and starring Nick Frost. A British family goes on vacation to a weird little Swedish island (played by a Finnish island) where they celebrate a dark local holiday.  I don’t want to give away any of the twists but it is funny and creepy and then Act 3 is a sudden orgy of gruesome yet still somehow funny blood and violence. Great acting all around; Nick Frost is Nick Frosting it up of course but the dynamic among all the family members was great and all the Finnish supporting actors were fun and weird. And when the Desert Eagle sings, you cannot mistake her cry.

Now, I did not manage to get in to see Anora (NYC sex worker goes to Russia) or U Are The Universe (Ukranian space truckers) but a bunch of people I talked with cited them as in their top 3 so give those a try too (I’ll be looking for them!)

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Fantastic Fest 2023 – The Bad

Posted on October 2, 2024 | Leave a comment

OK, so respect to all filmmakers, but some of the movies from the fest I was unhappy with. No 1/5s this year, I don’t completely regret seeing any of them, but I wouldn’t recommend someone watch them unless they are super into whatever its subject in and even then I’d have some notes.

And in the category of “bad”, I had some utter chaos IRL – I had to miss two showings due to a killer hailstorm partially destroying my house. 0/5 no bueno, would not recommend.  Maybe good fodder for a natural disaster film better than Acide. But once I got my shattered windows and skylight covered and called my insurance company, there was really nothing to do but go back to the fest!

Divinity, a very impressionistic black&white film about… immortality serum and… hard to be sure what else exactly. It is directed by Steven Soderbergh but do not let that lead you to think it is good or has a budget over $100k. Has angels (maybe), hookers (pretty sure), scientists (pretty sure), fetus milking (I think) and some stop motion animation for the final scene (real sure). And completely incomprehensible plot. Some interesting visuals at least, 2/5

The Origin aka Out of Darkness, where cro-mags 45000 years ago struggle to survive in Scotland, a blasted and inhospitable wasteland in the best of millennia.  Like Prey or 13th Warrior but less fun. High realism survival… or lack thereof. Dirty and boring mostly, but some suspense, 2/5

Kennedy – An Indian crime drama with our antihero being an ex-cop working as a hit man for crooked cops (and as an Uber driver?) and seeking revenge for his blown up boy. Nice and slick and well acted but way, way too long. 2/3 of the way through you’re like “I know how it’s gonna end let’s just get there eh?” Also he sees dead people but not in any plot relevant way. Cut a half hour or better yet 45 minutes out, put it on Netflix, people will watch it. 2/5

We Are Zombies – A “Z Nation” low-caliber production set in a world where the living and non-brain eating living dead (or “living impaired”) coexist.  Plot is about three slackers ripping off a zombie “humane disposal” company by getting there first and selling people’s former loved ones to a performance artist. “Zilf webcam shows” is the height of humor here.  2/5 and that’s me being generous.

100 Yards – Decent Chinese period martial arts fighting marred by a convoluted plot, frankly baffling character motivation, and indifferent acting.  Not enough martial arts per minute.  And in the end the victor is…. The French post office?  In a surprise last minute victory over… old people? Yes, seriously. I shoulda slept in.  2/5.

Baby Assassins 2 – two Japanese girls (not really babies, more like GenZs) cope with life as assassins guild members when they really just want to eat.  Two similar lads decide they need to kill them to get their spot in the guild and hijinks ensue.  Decent action and super annoying acting. A John Wick premise with an Aggretsuko execution.  Ok but forgettable, except that the Matthew Lillard looking one liked to snack on Churus (the cat treat), which was funny. 2/5

One-Percenter – a Japanese action star really knows him some action and unleashes it on some Yakuza in a “Die Hard in a factory” scenario when they interrupt his filming.  It was ok but the kills (well, takedowns) were a little weak. Floppy fake guns were distracting and I had seen things like flashlight beat downs done much better at the same film festival. And there was too much “meta” actor/stuntman self congratulatory stuff for me (hey film people your film’s audience is not just filmmakers, if you want to make more than $20 that is). 2/5

Saw X – Normally I wouldn’t go to a Saw movie but it was a secret screening so I was already seated by the time it started (though about ten people rushed the door to leave once it was announced).  I haven’t watched many Saw movies so had to figure out that the old guy was Jigsaw and the chick was his apprentice, but I got there.  Jigsaw has brain cancer and goes to an international clinic but it’s a scam so it’s torture murder time.  But man there was a lot of plot relative to the torture murders, unusually, which made it better for me than the average Saw movie. Torture porn not my thing 2/5

The Deep Dark – French miners (well, one is French, the rest are the European version of diversity, a Spaniard, Italian, Moroccan, and so on) dig too deep at the behest of some visiting archaeologist and find some Lovecraft, and get chased around the mines by a Spirit Halloween display.  Started well but lagging pacing and fully showing an unconvincing puppet monster hurt it (have you read no Lovecraft!  Fear of the unknown yo, don’t show the monster so much). 2/5

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Fantastic Fest 2023 – The Mid

Posted on September 30, 2024 | Leave a comment

Not every film can be great, but these are decent and if you’re into whatever their niche is you should give them a try.

The Other Laurens, a French neo-noir (but high color saturation style), a private detective’s estranged twin brother dies and his niece dupes him in to investigate and you know, rich people, bikers, smuggling, betrayal. Slow burn but enjoyable, watch if you like French noir, 3/5

The Silence Project aka Project Silence, where a bunch of squalling Koreans get stuck on a bridge with escaped military-enhanced murder dogs.  Modern, slick, serviceable. For God’s sake Koreans in crisis shriek and yowl and beat their breast and fall down in an outpouring of emotion a lot. They go for a satisfying “punch the guy in charge after the rescue” ending but the lead character was a dirtbag politician until close to the end which robs it of some of the satisfaction. Think of it as “Train to Busan but not as good.”  Watch if you are super into Korean movies, 3/5

Tiger Stripes – A Malaysian girl gets her period and as is traditional that turns into body horror, and ends up with some possession by/turning into a tiger (maybe?).  Looks at the separation that happens between children and young women when they hit that age. Good child actors!  And I liked the look into Malay culture. Well done, 3/5

Eileen – Based on an Ottessa Moshfegh novel (which I then bought at the fest book fair!) in which a young Massachusetts lady is working in a prison and taking care of her drunk widower ex-cop dad in a realistically unpleasant New England. She has her sexual awakening, like most of us, via Anne Hathaway, who plays an elegant prison psychiatrist. Some great lines like “Did she seem angry to you?” “It’s Massachusetts, everyone is angry.” It goes quickly from coming of age story to crime investigation to crime committing. Sometimes it’s not a good idea to liberate the quiet ones, 3/5

Acide – French movie about acid rain attacking.  I was excited and from the intro and opening I thought we were gonna get something good, but then… The color was trash, like ultra compression artifacts trash, but I heard from someone later that was our projection setup not the movie. But then there were very very few people-melts, and I had been led to expect many.  Was it not finished?  There was a blank spot for 15 seconds when I think horses were getting acid rained on…  And like I get it, they’re French, but the amount of flopping to the ground when in danger and total lack of survival skills was shocking.  Not gonna put some plastic sheeting over that car eh?  Gonna wrap your feet in aluminum tins not plastic bags?  No one has baking soda or hydrogen peroxide to treat getting splashed by acid?  The choices (repeatedly) to drive around screaming in the rain instead of just parking inside something was infuriating. I have never said the sentence “Roland Emmerich should remake this” in my life, but now I am. 2/5 but that is influenced by the poor video quality of the version I saw, may be 3/5.

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Fantastic Fest 2023 – The Good

Posted on September 28, 2024 | Leave a comment

Plenty of perfectly good movies of various types at this FF!

The Animal Kingdom, a French movie where some people start gradually turning into one animal or another, causing French style social unrest. A boy and his dad move to a smaller town to be close to “the center” the mom has been remanded to when the boy starts showing signs of animalism too…. Well shot and well made. We all watch tv with subtitles on nowadays, let’s get this going here in the US.  4/5.

Saltburn – Very well made Harry Potter slashfic I saw as a secret screening.  The lad from Banshees of Inisherin goes to Oxford and meets a rich boy who takes him back to his manor house of Saltburn to hang out with his decadent/goofy family leading to both homoeroticism and The Talented Mr. Ripley style supplantation.  Suspenseful, with some super gross scenes causing the audience to scream “oh god why” a couple times – like Babylon x2. 4/5 or 3/5 if you have a weak stomach. [Editor’s note from a year later – this came out in theaters and made a good splash.]

The Last Stop in Yuma County – A fun entry in the “stuck in a diner under threat of violence” genre, with great characters which is what you need out of one of those.  Various people with various agendas, some criminal, drop in on a diner out in the middle of nowhere and things start to get tense. Good writing and acting and use of the location. The producer sold his house to make it, which is a little drastic but I think it’ll pay off. 4/5

Cobweb – A fun Korean movie about the rigors of moviemaking, which I was prepared to dislike because I don’t like filmmakers masturbating about how cool they are but Jee-woon Kim successfully subverts expectations.  Song Kang-ho does a great job as the director who is trying to re-shoot his movie to make it Brilliant(tm) despite the government censors being against it, although I am not sure any of the performances count as “nuanced.” The spider won me over, 4/5

Dream Scenario – A secret screening. Nicolas Cage (well, his character, an average Joe professor) starts appearing in people’s dreams, it turns into an Internet meme once people clue in, and then it all goes bad.  Less blood-covered shrieking Cage than many of his recent movies – but not zero.   Good A24 type stuff, though a little heavy handed on the social media/cancel culture theme.  4/5 [Editor’s note from a year later – this also came out in theaters and made a good splash.]

Dogman – A secret screening. Luc Besson directed (but all American English) movie about a… drag queen dog whisperer in a wheelchair!  It was really interesting, and mostly hinged on Caleb Landry Jones’ virtuoso performance.  As an aside, that is one Joker looking son of a bitch if ever I saw one, DC needs to call him up. Anyway, very interesting narrative structure, mostly “The Usual Suspects” style extended interrogation flashback style.  Similarities to The Professional in that it ends up in a bit of apocalyptic shootout but also in that it has real heart and compassion for its characters.  Really enjoyable. I appreciated that drag was part of the main character’s ongoing healing process from his abusive childhood, not related to his “crimes” in any way. No distribution in North America yet because of the anti-Besson sentiment. 4/5

Spooktacular! – A documentary about the Spookyworld theme park that rose and fell in the 1990s in the Northeast and spurred the rise of the modern hardcore haunted house industry.  Mixes park content with business realities and social change and its interaction with the park.  And plenty of Alice Cooper and Tom Savini, who were involved at points. Really interesting, and makes me wish I had been to Spookyworld!  We have House of Torment here in Austin but it only does a third of what these folks did! 4/5 at least in documentary terms. https://www.spooktacularthemovie.com

When Evil Lurks – an Argentinian movie following two brothers who desperately try to escape a demonic presence that moves and spreads kinda like Legion but with more people being affected. I like that the government has standard protocols for handling this but generally is inefficient and sucky so it gets out of hand before they start actually following them.  Reminds me of the Mexican movie “We Are What We Are” I saw a previous year at FF where cannibals on a rampage were called in by the police as a “code 17”, a concerningly low number for such an event. The seven rules for dealing with the “corrupted” are basically “run” which is what they do.  Shocking violence against kids. Some holes but fewer than most modern horror movies! 4/5

Your Lucky Day – a $156 million lottery ticket winner in a bodega at night close to the holidays results in a robbery gone wrong, the winner and a policeman getting capped, and then the survivors – a robber, the clerk, and a married and expecting couple, deciding “well… maybe we should cook up a story about what happened and split the winnings.”  Needless to say such plans are unstable and things go from bad to worse as more people get involved, with the increasing body count resulting in yet more convoluted schemes. P.S. ACAB.  4/5

Sri Asih: The Warrior – Indonesian Wonder Woman, basically, in the “Bumlangit Cinematic Universe” which is as much or more fun and high budget as the DCEU. A girl is born during a weirdly supernatural volcano eruption, grows up in an orphanage, gets adopted and trained as a MMA fighter as visions of a fire goddess try to convince her to unleash her anger and give in to the dark side… and then basically she becomes a superhero! She then combats the ever popular combination of supernatural evil, the criminal rich, and the patriarchy.   Good mostly practical fight scenes,  top quality cinematography, action choreography by the company the Raid guy founded. Great work here, better than most DC movies and at least half of the Wonder Woman movies. 4/5

I’ll Crush Y’all, aka Os reviento – Spanish movie where a boxer and ex-criminal trying to just live a clean life gets caught up in a bunch of accidentally colliding criminal schemes after his father dies of old age, requiring him to beat the stuffing out of various waves of local goons.  His brother and ex-girlfriend and new would-be girlfriend and father’s old flame put in appearances as well, and you understand the relationships between the various groups here they’re not just arbitrary unrelated criminal armies like in so many less good movies. Bloody and funny with a lot of friendly fire and self injuries by the street level thugs as the bodies pile up. Got the Fantastic Fest audience award, I wouldn’t go that far but it was fun and violent, 4/5

Totally Killer – A Blumhouse joint in the vein of Happy Death Day’s vibe and a plot that’s Halloween crossed with Back To The Future. A modern gen-Z girl has parents whose friends got serial-killed back in the 1980s by a masked killer leading up to Halloween, and the killer suddenly returns and kills her mom!  This then leads her to get her friend’s time machine she’s been developing (eye roll) to to back in time to stop the murders. Most of the humor is from a modern kid being back in the unsafe 1980s, and it’s pretty funny, it doesn’t spend time on cheap pop culture references, but shows her culture shock with the lack of security and such.  A ride in a station wagon with all all windows rolled up and completely full of cigarette smoke with kids in the back gave me IRL flashbacks. Fun, silly, stabby, 4/5, take a point off if you weren’t around in the 80’s.

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Fantastic Fest 2023 – The Best

Posted on September 26, 2024 | Leave a comment

I have enjoyed going to Fantastic Fest, the genre film festival started by the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse, Tim League, since… 2009!?! Holy shit I’m old. Anyway, I go, not every year, and I write up film reviews here, though not every year. It’s a week of black shirted men and tattooed women at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in Austin watching 5 movies a day! They specialize in “genre” movies – SF, horror, action, weird, foreign…  Some are “secret screenings” where you don’t know what you’re going to see until you’re seated. Anyway, I just got back from FF 2024 and realized I never posted my 2023 reviews so time to get caught up!

My rating scale (in my opinion of course, YMMV, but I don’t bother beating around the bush if I don’t like something):

  • 5/5 – Great movie, I plan on actively promoting it to anyone who will listen, will happily rewatch it
  • 4/5 – Good movie, seek it out
  • 3/5 – OK, worth watching
  • 2/5 – Fair – don’t regret watching it per se but wouldn’t recommend it without some caveats
  • 1/5 – Bad – regret spending hours of my time on this trash (none of these this time, and usually there are!)

Let’s see… I’ll start out with the best ones, and do separate posts for the good, mid, and bad ones. There were four films I really loved this year and gave 5/5 to. Definitely check them out, they’re all on Amazon Prime and Apple TV as well as a long tail of other outlets, except sadly for Triggered.

Action!

Triggered, a Filipino action movie with loads of great and bloody action. A commando vet with PTSD is hired to guard a warehouse and two teens seeking refuge bring a waves of corrupt drug cops in to get killed with guns, knives, flashlights, hands, debris, table saws, explosions…. But with a remarkably deft hand with humanizing all out participants via their families and lives. First Blood meets Hard Target meets The Raid. Put it in theaters already! 5/5

Kill – an Indian (Sikh) movie that is a “Die Hard on a train” scenario (I refuse to mention Under Siege 2) where our commando hero and his clandestine fiancée gets caught up in a train robbery by a big extended family bandit gang like they have over there. He is all about “no just beat them up don’t kill them” for the first act, I was starting to roll my eyes and think poorly of our hero, and then one baddie just up and knifes his would-be fiancée to death and then it is MURDER TIME.  Brutal kills that had even a hardened Fantastic Fest crowd hooting and hollering. Death by knife, cleaver, hammer, fire extinguisher (both ends), lighter fluid, toilet, and more.  He scares the piss out of the bad guys to where some just bail. They all go forward to “get him” and find a dozen of their dead are hanging by sheets in the intervening train car and they have to take a good cry break. Hard core! [Editor’s note from a year later – I mentioned this to an Indian coworker and they were impressed, this had just come out in theaters and made a splash there.] 5/5

Cinema!

Animalia – Whoa that was deep.  You follow a pregnant Moroccan woman who was a poor Berber but married into a rich family. The rest of the family goes away on a trip and then weird stuff starts happening.  As she travels trying to get to her husband, there is constant tension and increasing weirdness. Beautifully shot.  “Confidently ambiguous” in the wording of this Variety review.  If something makes you think, is it “arthouse“ nowadays?  It blended social roles, religion, philosophy, metaphysics, and science fiction slash the supernatural in a realistically complex melange. Reminded me a little of 2001: A Space Odyssey without taking as much of a sudden turn into weird.  I find it hard to believe this was Sofia Alaoui’s first film, it was casually masterful.  It had no clear firm resolution or statement, but frankly I like that. This film makes me want to think about it and discuss it with others. 5/5

Family Fun!

Riddle of Fire – Wowza!  Shot in 16mm and evoking the 1970s live action Disney movies, we get three roguish youngsters who run around loose like I did as a kid in the 70s and then go through some good old fashioned child endangerment, but with a faerie mythology layer slathered on top.  The mix of contemporary and literary language in the dialogue reminded me of O Brother, Where Art Thou, mixed with the original Bad News Bears and Pete’s Dragon.  And it was HILARIOUS.  The kid actors and their dialogue and mannerisms were so winning.  They meet a member of the gang they’ll come to loggerheads with, the Circle of the Enchanted Sword (a kinda Manson Family lite) who’s a big cowboy shit-kicker type and they say “he looks like he plays the jug in a hillbilly band” and then refer to him consistently as “that woodsy bastard” thereafter, which made me belly-laugh every time. Cute, foul, resourceful, and touching in turns.  This film is why I go to Fantastic Fest, to be completely surprised and delighted by something I didn’t know I was looking for but enjoyed immensely. 5/5 must see when it hits theaters next year and I’ll be telling everyone I know to go. [Editor’s note from a year later – I bought the Blu-Ray of this from Vinegar Syndrome so I can show it to anyone who will sit still.]

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Fantastic Fest 2015 – The Frustrating

Posted on October 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

Part 3 of my Fantastic Fest movie reviews. Spoilers abound, so be warned. Sadly there’s a lot of movies in this category this year. Most of them had promise and aren’t all bad, but took a wrong turn – one of several common wrong turns, interestingly enough, so rather than just skip over them I’m going to call them out in an attempt to correct some of the common cinematic sins I’m seeing.

I get it, struggling filmmakers.  You managed to get some footage out of a couple thousand dollars and you’re putting it together into a film. You can’t bring yourself to cut out that 20 minutes of pointless noodling in your third act because that footage was so hard won. But you need to. In edit, build your movie together out of what you have and then stop when it’s complete, don’t just have more for more’s sake. I wanted to fall asleep in the third act of a full 1/3 of the movies at the fest this year and that’s just plain ridiculous.

Few films at Fantastic Fest are ever just plain bad (well, except for those intended to be that way). Except for “Balada Triste,” which I hold a grudge against to this day. All of these had something good going for them, but managed to squander it somehow.

Artsiness Does Not Prevent Your Movie From Getting Boring

RUINED-HEART-1500x816Ruined Heart – a Filipino movie about a street level gangster and his girlfriend. It was ambitious – virtually no dialogue, very impressionistic. But I’m afraid its reach exceeded its grasp;  it was interesting but then as it drug on the approach started to come apart at its seams and become tiresome. It went from “impressionist” to “what’s going on now?” to “I don’t really care any more” as act 1 moved into 2 into 3.

La-GranjaLa Granja – A similar issue was to be had with La Granja, a movie about the slums of Puerto Rico and the crazy degenerate stuff its inhabitants are subjected to. It was fine and interesting, but used the technique that this Fantastic Fest taught me to dread, the “we’ll show you the movie as one series of events from 3-5 different persepectives!” technique. Apparently everyone decided this was the artsy thing to do this year, but in this case the additional tellings didn’t really add much new in terms of texture or information to the story, so once you were past a couple of them it became boring to see the same stuff retreaded. It could have had a couple perspectives removed without hurting (and therefore subsequently improving) the film. Also, the nurse’s baby-stealing seemed like it was outside of the core arc of the movie.

darlingDarling – A movie about a chick who moves in to be caretaker of a big ol’ New York mansion/apartment and then some combination of it’s haunted or she’s crazy or whatever. In black and white for artsiness.  But just not that much happened over the course of this movie. It is a short in feature length clothing. I don’t mind some moodiness but the ratio of moodiness to anything freaking happening was very poor.

Laura Ashley Carter doesn’t do a bad job, but the combination of writing and direction is not sufficient to the intended result of being a study of a descent into madness, and the hints at supernatural agency are hamhanded. Another third act sleeper (to be fair, we spend a lot of time watching her sleep, so it may be intending to make you drowsy for some reason).

Pacing, Please Learn It And Use It

baskinBaskin – a Turkish movie about a minivan full of roving Turkish cops that get called to a spooky-type village and a spooky-type house with mutated cultists in it. It starts out very interesting, with some weird experiences and dream(?) or flashback (?) sequences, to the point that I was trying to figure out if this was all really happening or if the young cop was just in Purgatory or what. And then they all just get caught, strapped to pillars, and tortured to death by mutants for the entire third act.

I was very disappointed in this – I mean, if you want to do torture porn, fine, but the pacing of a heretofore decent movie was just completely blown out by this.  Simple fix – capture one, torture him to death, have the others still running around, grab another one of them… But slamming to a stop and just doing 45 minutes of grotesque sitting in place is tiring to the point of being nap-inducing. I would love to see the first 2/3 of this movie with a completely, totally rewritten end 1/3 on it.

LUDO-620x400Ludo – an Indian (Bengali) movie about four roving Indian teens looking for a safe place to drink and screw, who after zooming around the city on their two mopeds and being turned away from every fleabag motel in town (apparently they’re serious about their morality laws there) hide out in a shopping mall till after hours. I liked all four characters and the actors, even though the montage of trying to find hotels could have had 10 minutes cut out of it. Then they meet two spooky old people also in the  mall after hours and then they all get Parcheesied to death.

OK so I get the Parcheesi thing, it can come across as a little silly here where Parcheesi is more of a kid’s game, but over there it’s the “game of kings” so one can mentally substitute playing chess or something. But again, in this movie the pace comes to a dead stop, since the game board just hypnotizes everyone into sitting around it like zombies playing till they get eaten.

They try to compensate for this, I guess, by having a long long long long long flashback to when the two old folks originally found the magic Parcheesi set back in long ago India (like, rocks and clubs level long ago). Yes, the two characters who we don’t give a shit about, unlike the four characters we’ve spent the last hour growing to know and care about. Like, it goes beyond flashback to full fledged subplot about them and some witch and other stuff it was hard to follow and/or care about.

Just like Baskin, I’d like someone to take the first 1/2 of this movie and then write an ending that a) involves the original damn characters and b) maintains some kind of momentum.

Sometimes Retro Is Just Bad

dangerousmenDangerous Men – A single guy, John S. Rad, made this movie over like 26 years. He’s director, writer, songwriter, and about everything else. It’s hilariously retro, with a bunch of “interesting” (read: psychotic) plot and casting and set and music and everything else choices. It starts out being about a chick whose boyfriend gets murdered by bikers and she gets carried off and then she kills them and goes on a serial killer spree focused on male predators. Then a cop shows up and goes on a completely unrelated biker-shooting romp (apparently the actress got fired 2/3 of the way through) and then he gets beaten into a coma and then a third character, the police chief (I guess?) tracks down the ’80’s wrestler looking bad guy Black Pepper (NB: not black) and arrests him.

So the cluelessness and bad ’80’s stuff is entertaining for about a half hour. But then it turns the corner to just “hey this is pretty bad.” Especially when the plot completely changed. I get it, Kung Fury etc. and retro making-fun are all big right now, but this is an incarnation of it only someone in full hipster mode can stand behind. Not every single-person retro junk movie is “so bad it’s good” – sometimes it is just bad. The audacity of its badness is good for a while but then it wears off.

Goddamn Germans

germanangstGerman Angst – Three nearly unrelated German shorts. Short 1 – a girl has her dad (?) strapped to a bed and castrates and kills and mutilates him.  She owns guinea pigs. Then she leaves. Maybe it didn’t happen. The end.

Short 2 – Some deaf-mute hiker lovebirds get death-stomped by a mostly German gang. But they have a necklace that might do soul-swapping in bodies, as a tale the man signs to the woman indicates, he got it from his… mom? Grandma? Who used it to get away from the Nazis in wartime Poland. (Or did she…) This is kinda interesting as a setup but it gets super annoying with just the yelling and carrying on and stuff for so long. Whoever the blond screamy gang chick is I wanted her to die of leukemia, I got so sick of hearing it. Then this winds up with the head skinhead giving a lengthy looking-at-the-camera apologia for their behavior, blaming their Polack-killing on the “granite weight of guilt” of still being identified with Nazis. This is done in such a way that it’s pretty transparently A Message To You From The Filmmakers. My response to that is “Fuck you.” You get to not get Nazi stigma once everyone who got stuck in one of those camps has passed away, and everyone that had to fight in that war has passed away.  Act right for one human lifetime (and you’re doing great so far) and then we’ll all stop using the N-word.  I think that’s fair payment in kind for millions of lives.  Till then STFU and take it. (N.B. I am of German descent myself so see no reason to beat around the bush here.)

Short 3 was better but I was still pissed off from shorts 1 and 2. A guy joins some kind of sex club but then it starts to become clear they are probably mating with some weird mandrake-based plant creature, but woot the orgasms are great, so it’s quite the dilemma of what to do. Would make a good “Twilight Zone” episode for a HBO-type Twilight Zone kind of program.

Except for a very very slight effort at relating the three stories in any way, they really are completely separate and very inconsistent in tone and nature. This is less a movie and more of a sampler pitch. And, the granite weight of guilt, my balls.

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Fantastic Fest 2015 – The Decent

Posted on October 5, 2015 | Leave a comment

Here’s the Fantastic Fest 2015 midfield. There were a pretty decent batch of movies I enjoyed, though with some issues. Spoilers abound. In somewhat order from ones I liked more to ones I had more issues with.

SchneiderVSBax450x270Schneider vs. Bax – a Dutch movie by the director of Borgman, Alex van Warmerdam, this was an assassin vs assassin movie that wanted to be a Coen Brothers type fiasco story. It was well done technically, with some funny bits (mainly drunk/druggie old assassin failing to jump a drainage ditch, mixing his speed up with his hallucinogens, etc.). It had a nice visual style as well, and some good characters. I liked it and wanted to like it a lot more.

But it didn’t make Coen Brothers or Guy Richie level mainly because though there were a bunch of characters, they weren’t really quirky at that kind of level and more importantly did not have strong agendas of their own bringing them into conflict. Why were the assassins being pitted against each other? No reason given. What were the motivations of the daughter, the girlfriend, the girlfriend’s boyfriend? Nothing besides the super bare bones of “they were there.” So much happens without any later consequence or payoff (the pimp he KOs and leaves in a construction yard, the park ranger…). In the end it wasn’t sufficiently quirky or actiony or macabre or gritty or twisty or anything, leaving it feeling pretty but hollow.

Here’s how this movie would have been more interesting.  The middleman wants one assassin to take out the other because… He’s dating his daughter!  The girlfriend comes back with her new boyfriend to get stuff because… She needs $30,000 to… Start a new life in Amsterdam or pay off her drug dealer or something, so assassin#1 can bribe her to turn on assassin#2. Give them *reasons* to fuck with each other.  When they send away three of the characters in a car it’s as if they’re saying “Whoops, we introduced all of you but then realized you’re contributing nothing to the story, get outta here.” On the positive side, I really liked Maria Kraakman’s performance as the daughter, going from annoying basket case to pretty competent planner to coming up with an ingenious solution to the problem. I’d like to see her in more things going forward.

SvB wasn’t bad, I don’t feel like the time watching it was wasted, but it was a shame that this well made movie could have been about 200% more interesting with some story workshopping. At least it’s not “Ecks vs. Sever“.

GridlockedGridlocked – Basically Assault on Precinct 13 remade, with some Die Hard, S.W.A.T., etc. mixed in. Dominic Purcell is the hard-bitten cop and Cody Hackman is the feckless actor he’s bringing along on his work (as part of a community service type sentence for being an ass), Danny Glover is the ‘too old for this shit’ desk sergeant, Stephen Lang (Avatar baddie) is the bad guy leader, etc. Fun and serviceable, seems like it’d make standard action movie bank at your local Cineplex.

The majority of the movie is the protagonists trapped in a secure SWAT type facility with the numerically superior bad guys trying to get in. Violence ensues – the defensive posture gives them an advantage but they don’t (usually) mow the baddies down like mooks, they’re all super tactical too and there’s a mole… NOW SHOOT HIM!

derbunkerDer Bunker – A super weird German movie about a student on the search for the Grand Unified Theory who goes and rents a room from a family that lives in a bunker, and gets drawn into their bizarre life (the wife talks to a possessed (?) lesion on her leg, they dress their home-schooled kid who is allegedly 8 but looks 35 as Little Lord Fauntleroy, the dad tells lame jokes from a book and explains at painful length why they are funny). Everyone’s weird agendas unfold in the cult-like family’s shadow. A little slow in the third act but otherwise a good experience. I’d write more but a) it’s hard to explain really and b) I don’t want to give too much away. Worth watching.

deathless_devilThe Deathless Devil – a Turkish remake of The Mysterious Dr. Satan. OK, so movies from 1973 in a festival lineup are padding, pure and simple. But it was better than a lot of other things I saw at the fest. Masked wrestler Copperhead tries to protect his girlfriend and her scientist dad from the depredations of the moustachioed Dr. Satan and his robot and henchmen, aided only by a twisted little cavorting pervert dressed in a Sherlock Holmes outfit. Well, and the cops. Parts of this were mystifying – like when they find out the secretary is a mole, Copperhead just up and bangs her (what about your girlfriend man, this is gonna come out sooner or later!) and they all talk to each other like they’re part of some kind of military or something even though as best as I can tell the scientist and Copperhead have no direct relation to either the cops or military, both of whom show up separately.

Like so many movies at this fest, it needed a lot of editing and a huge amount cut out of the third act – I get it was a serial, but so when you turn it into a movie please cut some of the repetition out, I could have dealt with one fewer chick-and-her-scientist-dad-get-captured-again cycles.

LovemillaLovemilla – A super weird Finnish comedy with superheroes and cyborgs and aliens and baristas in love.  And “zombies”, which apparently drinking booze turns you into. Protagonist Milla and her puddin-faced beau Aimo have issues, getting advice of varying quality from their friends “rich girl,” “feminist superhero,” and “gay guy.” It’s super silly and designed to be.

The anecdote that will stay with me forever, however, is the question at the end from a hipster chick to the director. In the movie the gay guy falls for a girl and insists he can’t be bi because “bisexuals are just perverts” – a funny and on-target sendup of many gay groups’ reaction to a member of the tribe “defecting” for various reasons. But her question was along the lines of “Oh do you have problems with that in Finland because here in America we are all completely comfortable with gender fluidity…”  Chris and I looked askance at each other and figured she must have never in her life left a 5 mile radius of downtown Austin to be able to say that with a straight face. Yes, I’m sure the Nordic countries have worse problems with tolerance than we do here.  Try driving out to Killeen and see how “comfortable they are” with your “gender fluidity.” Good Lord.

highriseHigh-Rise – An interesting movie about people living in a high-rise apartment segregated along class lines and how it goes all Lord of the Flies. Chris liked this one a lot and would have me put it in The Best, but for an otherwise realistically filmed movie the isolation of the inhabitants and why they stayed when things went to crap is completely unexplainable. Maybe put this on an island with a ferry to the mainland or something… Anyway, Naked Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is our protagonist and Shrieking Villain From Dungeons & Dragons (Jeremy Irons) is the Architect (yes, like from the Matrix).  The evil rich class are represented by Bard from the Hobbit (Luke Evans) and Solomon Kane (James Purefoy). It went pretty medieval but with a cast like this I kept expecting someone to break out into a swordfight.

Anyway Loki is a doctor and he moves into this high rise and it has rich snoots and rough lower class folks and then utilities shut down and the in-house supermarket doesn’t get any more stock and soon rape and pillage are the rule of the day. Two cops show up once but the Architect gets them to go away with a vague “we’re all OK here” and hints at a bribe. You’d think after there were cars on fire and dead bodies strewn around the tower that wouldn’t work any more, but it’s the UK so who knows.

los_parecidosThe Similars (aka Los Parecidos) – They say Isaac Ezban is the only Mexican director doing science fiction nowadays. The Similars is basically a mashup of a bunch of old Twilight Zone episodes. Which is fine, and probably good for a market where there’s no science fiction – to me, I was like “oh look the twilight zone episodes I already saw again.” The omnipotent psychic kid, the people all turning into the same person, etc. It was well made, though had a bit of third-act lag and could have stood to have 10 minutes or so cut around then.

But, they did give us all a little Caballero porn booklet where all the women had a bearded Mexican face on them. I will keep that until my dying day so the people going through my effects have to try to figure out what the fuck my problem was.

sensoria-6Sensoria – a Swedish movie that, while better than Darling (in the Frustrating section), had a lot of the same issues just to a lesser degree.  A lady, freshly broken up from her husband, moves into a new flat. It’s creepy and the neighbors are weird.  She meets pretty obvious ghosts quickly and then snap she gets ghosted. The end. Muted color palette. Lots of sound work. It was decent but basically very, very straightforward plot wise and there weren’t any meaningful decisions made by our protagonist so there wasn’t really any dramatic tension besides “eek a spook” from time to time.  I wrestled with putting this one here or in the “Frustrating” section because the moodiness with little backing plot left it feelign empty, but the characters (especially the creepy upstairs neighbor who could make out with another chick without his eyes ever leaving the protagonist) were good. -1 for starting out with a Lovecraft quote when Lovecraftian horror had nothing to do with this film.

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Fantastic Fest 2015 – The Best

Posted on October 4, 2015 | Leave a comment

There were four movies that I unreservedly enjoyed this festival. They are the best of the ones I saw (of course one person can only see a minority of the films at Fantastic Fest). Spoilers are included, so be warned (though not too many, since these are good I am leaving most twists and endings unstated).

jeremy-saulniers-green-roomGreen Room is a movie about a punk band playing at a skinhead-infested venue who accidentally witnesses the aftermath of a murder and things go bad. It’s written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier who also brought us the recent Blue Ruin. It’s got a great cast, including Anton Yelchin (Chekov from the Star Trek reboot and the main kid from the Fright Night reboot) and Sir Patrick Stewart as the skinhead group’s leader! Along with a bunch of other experienced folks (including Macon Blair, the lead from Blue Ruin).

It was taut and well-paced; the writing was really good and the kills were brutal. It was done in a very realistic manner – you really buy the ensemble as a punk band teetering on the edge of viability (“I wanted to buy them all a sandwich and a glass of milk,” said Chris.) All the characters were solid and well-defined and made good, realistic decisions – not overly stupid in the face of danger but also not cranked up to Maximum Riddick, you felt the danger and appreciated the protagonists’ attempts to get out of their situation. And it was definitely gory, the several women to my right were covering their eyes during several scenes – but it’s not torture porn, and the suddenness of the brutality kept the audience electrified. Little bursts of humor were well received as tension releasers. And there was an extensive punk/metal soundtrack with everything included from Dead Kennedys to Slayer. (They kick off their set in the skinhead club with the former’s punk anthem “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” just to tweak them.)

The first showing was mobbed and the buzz off it was hot; at the second showing they expanded to two screens and it was still full to capacity with folks in standby lines hoping to get in. This is the kind of movie that when I see it at FF I ask “why is this not in normal theaters?” I guess maybe Hollywood will only show us horror movies that are either super-supernatural Sinister/Insidious/etc. or torture porn like Saw 29, and any thriller or action movie has to be PG-13 related to make all the tasty money.  Anyway, this is a great movie and I strongly urge you to go see it (assuming you can deal with some bloody deaths).

februaryFebruary is a smart horror film that managed to keep me guessing what the heck was going on, no mean feat nowadays with all my horror movie experience.  Starring Emma Roberts (from America Horror Story and various movies) and Kiernan Shipka (Sally Draper from Mad Men, et al.) it features two girls at an all-girl’s Catholic school who are left there over a break. Very suspenseful, it moves at a steady pace and reveals events from three perspectives, gradually unfolding the total story. This was done skillfully – I have to say, some of the other films at the festival did this in a more hamhanded way, either wasting your time extensively with scenes you’ve already seen, or just messing with the timeline to confuse you, or other poor handling of their attempt to be “artsy.” They should all watch this movie and then go back and re-edit their own movies with what they’ve learned.

I kept trying to guess what the heck was going on. “She’s a ghost!  No that other chick is a ghost!  No the parents are!  No, they all are!  The priest is a molester!” They didn’t use misdirection gimmicks, it was just using enough genre tropes but presenting them somewhat flatly and letting you run with supposition. I really liked the evolution of your understanding of the plot and thought the ending was a pleasant twist.

The acting of both of the girls was great, a lot was conveyed just through silence and micro-movements of facial features. Very different from the old school stage acting, it made me reflect on the subtlety of the newer form of HD close-up acting. And the cold, bleak mood was handled very well. In the end it wasn’t innovative, using tried and true plot and mechanisms, but it was very skillfully executed.

April and the Extraordinary WorldApril and the Extraordinary World (aka Avril et le monde truqué) was a cool animated movie that’s family appropriate, something almost unheard of with FF films. It’s based on a graphic novel by Jaqcues Tardi, set in an alternate steampunk France in 1941 where the world wars didn’t happen and oil etc. hasn’t been discovered so the entire earth has been denuded of first coal and then trees for charcoal. The government forces all scientists to work for them, and the movie starts with a raid on a scientist family where mom, dad, and grandpa all beat feet or are disappeared and the girl, April, escapes and then grows up in isolation, trying to reproduce their experiment, an elixir of health and immortality. And then there’s intelligent lizard cyborgs and a plot to save and/or destroy the earth!

The cat was a big hit as a character and the alternate timeline (double Eiffel Towers! A cowboy Statue of Liberty!) was interesting (if perhaps not bearing a lot of close inspection from a scientific realism point of view). The characters were interesting and the conflict between April’s parents was a nice touch. I do feel that a little should have been cut out in the third act – this is an animated film, you don’t have to reuse the sets, characters wandering back and forth to and from the laser-cages in the jungle got a little tiresome. So not perfect, but a fun movie.

thewaveThe Wave – a Norwegian version of a standard Hollywood big-budget action movie by Roar Uthag, though with more restraint than those usually have, making it more pleasant than 2012/The Freezening/One Or The Other Volcano Movie/etc. It’s about a geologist working to monitor a mountain near a fjord because when it drops the resultant tsunami will wipe a resort city off the map in 10 minutes. He’s a rebel and is the only one who believes it’s happening!  And his family is in danger! The usual fare, but I enjoyed the rest of the cast, especially the other geologists, not being dumbasses (including Fridtjov Såheim from Lilyhammer). And though there was a race away from the wave, it wasn’t the unrealistic “running 45 minutes with the disaster right behind you” crap they do in Hollywood. So like a Hollywood disaster movie but better. Not revolutionary but serviceable, and frankly just not actively pissing me off was enough to hit a high point with me by this point in the festival.

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Fantastic Fest 2015 – Overview

Posted on October 3, 2015 | Leave a comment

I just happened upon Fantastic Fest on a lark back in 2009 – I had a bunch of vacation to use or lose, saw an ad for it, thought “a genre film festival here in Austin?  OK, done!” It was a great experience and while I haven’t been able to go every single year since, I try to get to most of them (you can find writeups from some of them on this blog). And as also sometimes happens, fellow gamer Chris attended as well.

At a high level – this was a decent Fantastic Fest.  They have finally gotten a ticket reservation procedure that’s a pleasure to use… I remember having to rack out early after being up till 2 AM to drive all the way across Austin to wait in a line to get tickets to shows you wanted to get into (while already having a festival badge), then having to go burn a couple hours before the movie starts… Now it’s a nice little Web app open the day before and it slots you in.  I’ve gotten into everything I registered for except for the specials. I went on a daytime badge (have to tend the kid in the evenings) but had a lot of success just waiting standby on evening shows on days I was free.

The volunteers always run a great event – I always like seeing Winnie at work, she makes things happen!  My one suggestion is that most movies are shown twice. But ones shown in the day tended to have both showings in the day, and those at night at night. As a daytime badge holder this sucks, because towards the end you’re looking at slots with a lot of movies you’ve already seen in them and no chance to see some.  I assume there are other people that can only come at night, and have the same problem. Need to swap second showings day<->night. The new South Lamar venue is nice though there’s heavy construction going on in the surrounding blockhouses of condos. There’s a lot of good food choices within walking or short driving distance, and parking is free if pretty full up.

The down side was – well, hate to say it, but the movies.  The programming was not at all strong this year. Some years there’s been a huge amount of great stuff. This year, while they’ve been some good ones, it’s been a lot more sparse. Big waves of Japanese and Nordic movies have come and gone, even Korea’s not making much good stuff any more – they’re farming Turkey for new blood this time and just in general it seems like a lull year for genre films.

And a lot of the films weren’t that good. A large number suffered from the “third act problem” of putting me to fricking sleep in the third act. I imagine maybe if you’re an indie filmmaker that made your film on a $9000 budget that you don’t want to “throw away” any of your hard earned celluloid but I watched so many movies that needed 20 to, honestly, 45 minutes cut out of their runtime mostly in the third act and/or brought their pacing to a grinding halt 2/3 of the way through the movie this year that it was really frustrating.

Here’s a breakdown of the movies I saw at the fest. I do spoilers in these reviews as they are not just for you the curious moviegoer but also are feedback to the filmmakers and I think precision there is important.

THE BEST

THE DECENT

THE FRUSTRATING

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Five

Posted on October 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Whew, only halfway done and it’s already fading into the past, I need to pick up the pace.

Fantastic Fest 2011! Day five! Monday! Most of the filmmakers bail out, and it’s second screening time for the hot tickets.

Two Eyes Staring (8/10) – A little Dutch film about a little Dutch girl in a little Dutch house! (Well, Belgian, but that’s where we’d go to the grocery when we lived in Holland). Two Eyes Staring is a horror thriller, in which nine-year-old Lisa and her mom and dad move back to the ancestral home, and odd secrets start coming out… Like about her mom’s twin – did she kill her? Is she haunting the cellar? Does the mom not want Lisa? Are bad things about to happen? Yep!

I probably can’t give this movie a “fair” review. I lived in Holland for three years when I was young, I have a nine-year-old girl, and her mom, my ex, was a little on the haunted past/self centered side. So this movie landed right in my wheelhouse. It has a very slow build, but the twists are effective. I liked the interaction between the mom, dad, and kid – of course things don’t just go from zero to blow-up immediately, that’s how families work – and when weird/mildly bad things happen, you usually just have to live with it.

It’s not Paranormal Activity and doesn’t try to be; the horror elements are there but definitely made subsidiary to the family drama. To be fair, this is probably a 6/10 to those who haven’t lived in Holland and don’t have a little girl this age. But I do, so I guess I’m the target market!  Woot!

The Squad (2/10) – Okay, the previous movie proves that I don’t mind a slow pace. But The Squad totally sucked.

I was ready for some military horror.  I like me some military horror. After 10 minutes of film council logos, we open on a Columbian commando squad.

In fact, let me stop there.  A couple of the South American movies did this, but I’m going to complain about it here because this was the worst one.  What is up with the fricking logofest at the start of the movie?   OK, in some American movies you get a couple – Lionsgate!  Brought to you by Whoever! Produciton company! OK, fine, up to three I will tolerate. But these South Americans just run screen of logo after screen of logo.  Audience members started laughing after the same goddamn film council’s logo came up for the third time (no, seriously)!  Note to Columbia, Argentina, etc. – that shit has to stop. It’s like how your military strongmen have chests full of 200 bizarre medals – it makes you come across as corny, not cool.  FYI.

Now back to the sucking. This squad clearly has the military discipline of your average Boy Scout troop; they’re all violating orders and running out where they can get wounded within two minutes. They take over an empty abandoned base (apparently sending a squad of guys in by foot is the only way anyone gets in or out of this giant installation that clearly took heavy equipment to build) and they start to think oh maybe it’s witches or something, then they turn on each other. None of the actors are charismatic and the narrative doesn’t settle on any as a main character you can latch onto.The setting is awful, it’s mud + fog 90% of the time and the other 10% it’s unremarkable prefab buildings. The cinematography is dark and muddy and jerky. The characters are all goons; you’d think a Columbian death squad would have one intact pair of cojones amongst the lot of them, but it’s not to be. There’s just nothing good I could grab a hold of and say “Yes, but at least the.. characters, scenery, military tactics, cinematography, sound work… was good…”  In the end there is no tension, no release, no twist.  The ten minute MRE distribution scene was the most memorable, in retrospect. And it wasn’t good.

This movie is kinda like The Thing, without a Thing, and without Kurt Russell, and without John Carpenter directing. So it sucked is what I’m saying.

A Boy And His Samurai (9/10) – I was demoralized after The Squad, lucky I was about to be rescued by Yoshihiro Nakamura!  Nakamura-san’s movie Fish Story was my favorite of Fantastic Fest 2009, and I really liked Golden Slumber from Fantastic Fest 2010. So I couldn’t help but go see his latest at FF2011.It’s based on a manga, apparently.

A Boy And His Samurai is a family comedy. A kid and his barely-coping single mom run across a samurai who got zapped into modern day by praying at a Buddhist shrine. Now he has no idea what to do.  They take him in and he becomes a domestic ninja, so to speak. It’s funny and tender, and there’s conflict stemming from expected gender roles (without stupid Mr. Mom kinds of jokes). Even near the end, when the “young punks” scene jumps the shark a little bit, it’s a fun movie. And they’re not afraid to use the little kid to tug your heartstrings.

I described the movie to my daughter and she asked me who the “bad guy” was. That took me aback. I realized there usually has to be some bad guy or at least opposing foil in similar American movies to create tension.  But not in this case, everyone’s pretty much of good heart, and it highlights how even normal people trying to do the right thing are brought into conflict by the nature of the world.

Anyway, this just solidifies Nakamura in my mind as being a god of movies. I’ve seen one a year and every time they leave me moved and thankful. I can’t wait to watch this one with my daughter, once it’s released in some form!

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (7/10) – This Brazilian movie reminded me of District B-13 in that you can’t miss that’s a sequel. I’ve never seen the original, and it became obvious that it would provide some more perspective on the plot and relation to the characters that they don’t bother to provide you with inside this one.  Once you get over that, it’s a reasonably engaging criminals vs police vs the system tale (again, very District B13-like). There’s some great scenery and music, since it’s set in Brazil.

Whew, only three more days to go, but plenty more good movies!

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Four

Posted on October 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Sunday! This was a light day for me, at least movie-wise – for the second  year, my company scheduled its employee appreciation day where they rent out Six Flags Fiesta Texas on a Fantastic Fest day. I have a nine-year-old so I took off the day to take her to the amusement park – but after a day of 105 degree heat, there are still two movie slots to go after her bedtime! Feeling woozy, I attended…

Penumbra (6/10) – In this Argentinian movie, lisping Spanish real estate executive Marga isn’t a nice person, and the promise of easy money keeps her hanging out in an apartment she’s trying to rent while one, then two, then four people are there acting more and more freaky. There is nothing surprising at all about how the story unfolds, but it’s well done and you get to enjoy seeing them uppity wimmen get their comeuppance!

Rabies (7.5/10) – The directors discussed their path towards this, the very first Israeli horror movie! The funny thing is, they don’t understand why it’s the first either. The dialogue goes like this: “We want to make a horror movie!” “Oh, with how bad we have it, who wants to see those bad things? We want escapism!” “But, all our country’s movies are about war and stuff, isn’t that even more depressingly like the horror of our lives than some slasher flick?” “I don’t understand your moon-man language.” I don’t get it, and luckily neither do Navot Pupushado and Aharon Keshales, because they decided “screw it we’re doing it.”

Anyway, man this is a smart and deconstructionist take on a horror movie for the very first horror movie out of a country! I mean, you’d think they’d try to just execute a couple tried and true formulas to prime the pump, but no, this excellent film mixes tense slasher/all-fall-down thrills with “OH SHIT NO YOU DIDN’T” kills as well as nearly Scream-level self referential deconstruction of the horror genre.  Want an example?  Even the film’s title, RABIES, has nothing to do with the film. There’s no zombies or outbreak disease or anything. “We called it that to fuck with people’s expectations,” say the directors. Anyway,this film is more clever and cutting (in all senses of the word!  Ha!  Get it?) than all our current stock of wide-release slasher movies. It is way, way better than “our first one!” has any right to be. Go scary Jew power.

So, a short but fulfilling day. It was impressive – Juan of the Dead was a stellar first Cuban horror movie, and now Rabies is a great first Israeli horror movie. Where’s next, Chad?

 

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Three

Posted on October 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Day Two was solid, so can it get better for Day Three?  Yes it can!

El Narco (8/10) – (aka El Infierno) This movie is about Mexican drug gangs and the way of life they have become south of the border. Being a Texan, this is a topic of interest (the rest of the country appears to pretend there isn’t a war going on a couple hundred feet away from U.S. soil…). It features the alternately hapless and charming Benny coming back to Mexico from the U.S., which turned out to not be the land of milk and honey he’d hoped, to his small home town. The only decent jobs there are basically working for the drug gang, El Reyes del Norte (the Kings of the North). He resists briefly and then goes all in and Scarfaces it up for a while. It’s a great mix of dark comedy and a grim look at the reality of political corruption and dominance of the drug gangs in Mexico. This movie blends the wiseguy movie genre – it owes more than a little to Goodfellas – with the narco movie genre. Did you know there’s a whole genre of movies, the “narcopeliculas,”  paid for by the Mexican drug gangs to basically laud themselves?  And a whole genre of “narcocorrido” music that does the same? That’s how fucked up it is in Mexico right now. It’s gone beyond the “Boyz N The Hood” kind of gang as mini-society within a larger society, the narco gangs have become the larger society. The movie is political at times, but not hamhandedly so. You should see this movie.

Melancholia (8/10) – Kirsten Dunst plays a depressed rich white member of a very rich white family. This was like the whitest movie ever, it reminds me very much of some friends who are from a rich ex-British family in Maine. Anyway, the movie is appropriately named – it is like taking a little bottle of concentrated depression and drinking it. The Earth is destroyed in the first five minutes, and it’s all downhill from there. Director Lars von Trier of Antichrist fame brings the story of the Earth’s last days to us from the perspectives of two sisters played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Dunst puts in an AWESOME performance. I’ve been with some depressed women before, and OMG she totally nails it. The family interaction is great too, with the frustration of people who have a loved one with depression.  “Can’t you be happy, or at least not self destructive, for like ten minutes? It’s your wedding!” Seriously, this movie is super depressing, don’t see it if you’re not emotionally OK with that. I recommended it to some friends from Louisiana at the fest and afterwards they staggered out, eyes red, uttering profanity-laced outbursts about how it was “SO SAD!!!!!”

You Said What? (6/10) – Ah, those wacky Norwegians.  They took the premise of Takashi Miike’s Audition (a fake audition for a nonexistent movie to find women) and then it goes all romantic comedy as Glenn, the lad in question, can’t come clean and so puts together a whole film production to woo his beloved. Funny and enjoyable, largely predictable.  Good but nothing to write home about. They use a lot of late 80s/early 90s “Say Anything” kind of songs, which was kinda fun.

Knuckle (9/10) – The only documentary of the fest, Knuckle is a gripping documentary about the Irish Travellers (the Irish equivalent of gypsies). Ian Palmer spent 10 years with them filming them to make this film. The crux of the film revolves around ongoing feuds between Traveller families – in this case the Quinn McDonaghs, the Joyces, and the Nevins – whose grievances are settled by bare knuckle fights between selected fighters from each side, with only KO or surrender deciding the matter. James Quinn McDonagh, the champion of his family and one of the main subjects of the documentary, was in attendance at the fest, and we got some great insights out of him (especially about the time he got shot, which is mentioned only parenthetically in the film). It was hard for Palmer because the Travellers are generally quite insular and distrustful of outsiders, but he got some great stuff. The whole thing was fascinating – the generations worth of grudge over nothing anyone can articulate, the insistence on fair play in the fights, the pooling of family money to bet on the outcome, the role of video (a lot of the bad feelings were stirred up by families sending taunting VHS tapes to each other back in the day), to the ubiquity of kids around participating in the violence. Some fights you see; others had no cameras allowed – you experience them by family members standing by on cell phones (members of the family aren’t allowed at the fights due to risk of riot; the matches are refereed by other third party families). They range from four minutes and one guy’s down to a more than two hour (!!) fight that James Quinn had. It started as a clever scheme to keep bloodshed between the groups to a minimum, to settle differences in a civilized way, but you see (and James remarks upon) how the culture of feud and “fair fighting” ended up feeding on itself and growing to be an obsession. Even the directory noted how he became addicted to the fights and had to pull himself away from it to finish the film. Everyone there was hungry for more on this fascinating topic when it ended. The Q&A with James and the director was packed and went till they kicked us all out.

I stayed for so long in the Knuckle Q&A that I ended up skipping my last show of the day, I had planned to see A Lonely Place To Die  but it was getting late and I wanted to ruminate more on Knuckle, frankly. If you have any opportunity to see it, do so! Looks like it should be available via various channels now/soon…

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